Rather than building a single highly customized spacecraft for only one mission, Planetary Resources hopes to eventually mass produce a swarm of these machines, reducing the per-spacecraft cost and time for development.
Traveling 27,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft, left over from the Deep Impact mission, will come within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 on Thursday at 9 50 a.m.
As Messenger travels within 142 miles of Mercury at 12,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft's camera will swivel to stare at a succession of craters and other geological features that caught scientists' eyes during an earlier flyby.
According to our President & Chief Engineer, Chris Lewicki, "The Arkyd-100 Series will be the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that has ever been built.
And by measuring 50-micrometer-per-second Doppler shifts in the spacecraft's radio signal, MGS team members have recorded the subtle bobbing of the spacecraft as it passes over areas of greater or lesser gravitational pull.
"Gunfight interrupted by spacecraft".
With 67P hurtling along at 55,000 km per hour (34,000 mph), the spacecraft's speed has been adjusted so that in relative terms it will be flying beside the comet at a slow walking pace of 1m/sec (2.2mph, 3.6kph).
The Kepler mission's total pricetag is about $600 million thus far, and it costs about $20 million per year to operate the spacecraft and analyze the data, NASA officials have said.
During the day Sunday, the pull of Mars's gravity accelerated the spacecraft from 6,300 miles per hour to 12,700 m.p.h.
If all goes as planned, the friction of Mars' thin air rushing past the heat shield will have slowed the spacecraft to 1,000 miles per hour.
